HERE’S A NOT-VERY-POSITIVE TAKE on U.N. involvement in Iraq.

THOMAS NEPHEW has more information on those missing tourists in Algeria: German reports say they’re being held hostage in an effort to secure the freedom of convicted terrorists:

The goal is apparently to force the release of four Algerian extremists recently sentenced in Frankfurt for planning an attack on the Strassburg Christmas Market. The German foreign ministry did not want to comment. “Nothing is being ruled out” in the investigation and all leads are being persued, a spokesman said. Officially, all countries involved are still viewing kidnapping only as a possible scenario about the tourists’ whereabouts.

Interesting.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Jonathan Rauch writes on a distributed homeland security approach that, well, seems perfect for bloggers.

CHINA’S SECRETIVENESS ABOUT SARS is hurting its credibility worldwide, according to this report:

China’s restrictions on information about a highly infectious respiratory illness has undermined five years of diplomacy intended to alter its image as a prickly regional power and to improve relations with neighboring countries, Asian politicians and analysts say.

Beijing’s secretiveness for much of the last several weeks about severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, contrasts sharply with the openness of its neighbors, even one-party states like Singapore. It also reflects the emphasis China puts on overall social stability above individuals’ well-being, many argue.

The reaction to China’s handling of SARS has been pronounced in Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as in Singapore. Politicians, editorial writers and health experts have criticized the Chinese suppression of bad news, and apparent dissembling about SARS-related statistics, as a big step backward that undercuts its influence.

This sort of behavior, of course, dooms China to the status of a second-rate power, in both war and peace.

PREDICTING THE PROPAGANDA: Bitter Sanity has the next anti-U.S. meme scoped out in advance.

MARTIN DEVON writes on why Europeans, and Arabs, have trouble understanding America.

COX AND FORKUM on CNN.

CATHY SEIPP LIKES IT, but she feels a little dirty, afterward.

GET YOUR TALKING IRAQI INFORMATION MINISTER ACTION FIGURE here. No, really!

(Via Pathetic Earthlings.)

HOW HARD IS IT TO CRITICIZE CASTRO and still be a member of “Team Left?” This hard.

“WE SMOKED OUT THE PRINCE:” Plaintiffs’ lawyers suing Saudi Arabia over the 9/11 attacks seem pretty happy about how things are going.

UPDATE: Matt Welch has some thoughts here. Bush’s intimacy with the House of Saud is a major weakness, and the only reason that I can see for the Democrats’ not exploiting it is that they’ve been bought off, too. By the way, from the article linked above, here’s a list of lawyers retained by the Saudis:

Baker Botts, Sultan’s law firm, for example, still boasts former secretary of State James Baker as one of its senior partners. Its recent alumni include Robert Jordan, the former personal lawyer for President Bush who is now U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

An internal list of other law firms retained in the case, reviewed by NEWSWEEK , reads like a veritable “who’s who” of the U.S. legal community. Among those firms and their Saudi clients are: Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (Prince Mohammed al Faisal); Kellog, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans (Prince Turki al Faisal); Jones, Day (the Binladin Group); Ropes & Grey (Khaled bin Mahfouz); White & Case,(the Al-Rajhi Banking Group); King & Spalding (the Arab Bank and Youssef Nada); Akin Gump (Mohammed Hussein Al-Almoudi); and Fulbright & Jaworski (Nimir Petroleum.)

I wonder if Jones, Day carries that client on their firm resume?

POWER TO THE PEOPLE: I’ve got more on Iraqi reconstruction over at GlennReynolds.com — it’s mostly about the trust fund idea, which seems to have grown legs.

THE PHONY PEACE: Michael Kelly’s last column is now online. Excerpt:

I spent the last days of the first Gulf War’s phony peace in Baghdad, and I am spending the last days of this one’s in Kuwait, soon to take part in the experiment of “embedding,” as the jargon has it, some 500 journalists with the U.S. military for the duration of what is generally expected to be a short, exceedingly one-sided conflict. On the whole, I’d say, the phoniness quotient is down this time. We are spared, at least, much of the death-and-destruction-and-quagmire talk that preceded the last conflict here. The lessons of the campaign in Afghanistan, adding to the lessons of the campaigns in Kosovo and Bosnia, have sunk in. The U.S. armed forces enjoy a technological superiority like nothing the world has seen before; they are, in a real sense, not even fighting the same war as their opponents—or in the same century. No one argues much now about whether these forces are capable of crushing even very serious opposition, and almost no one argues that Iraq offers serious opposition. Rather, the argument concerns whether the employment of this almost unfathomable power will be largely for good, leading to the liberation of a tyrannized people and the spread of freedom, or largely for bad, leading to imperialism and colonialism, with a consequent corruption of America’s own values and freedoms. This question is real enough and more: probably the next hundred years hinges on the answer.

Yeah. That’s why I can’t bring myself to go on a blog vacation, or to quit writing about the war the way James Lileks is doing, just now. I’d like to, in a way, because all of this is, well, tiring. But I think, as Kelly did, that a lot hinges on what’s happening now.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus puts it better than I did:

You’re completely sick of the war — sick of watching cable, sick of reading the paper. The military campaign’s basically been won. The adrenalin is leaving your body. The overwhelming urge is to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to normal life, only more so: normal life minus current events. Yet this is just the moment when it’s probably most important to pay attention to what is going on in the Middle East, because these are the weeks when we will or won’t make the mistakes that will cost us the benefit of all the sacrifice of life and treasure.

Yeah, what he said.

AMERICAN EMPIRE is doing Command Post -style newsblogging about SARS.

WELL, I SAID EARLIER that Bush’s assault-weapon stance might prove expensive for him. It’s not proof yet, but this article suggests that he’s angered a core constituency.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer says I’m wrong. Hmm. So did Rand Simberg. Well, maybe I am. We’ll see.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Then again, maybe I’m not:

Gun chat rooms are rocking. Folks mad as hell about the Presidents stance.

Gun owners ELECTED Bush by a thin margin, because they enthusiastically worked for him. This time, even if they do hold their nose and vote for him, they are NOT going to put up yard signs, talk him up, campaign, send money,
etc.

I think this is a real mistake by Bush.

Robert Langham
Texas State Rifle Association Highpower Rifle Team Member, National Matches, ’02, 03.

But on the other hand, he’s being praised by gun-control groups! Somehow, though, I don’t think their members will actually vote for him, much less give money, or put up yard signs.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Capt. Mike McRae emails:

I am (and have been) a loyal Bush supporter. I am a lifelong Republican, a conservative thinker, and someone who cares deeply about the 2nd amendment and the direction in which this country is heading. My home state, New Jersey, is a disaster in terms of constitutional rights and we need help from the federal government. What we don’t need is the Republican President and Congress aiding the enemy.

I hate the liberals, but I hate back-stabbers more and would be a hypocrite if I still supported them anyway. .

Bush is unwise to support this continuation of the ban, because he gets so little in return. But we saw the same thing when he signed into law that miserable campaign finance legislation (right after which I stopped donating to the RNC), when he got so little in return.

I’ve gotten a lot of equally angry email from (formerly) committed Bush supporters. Has Karl Rove dropped the ball here? It depends on how many people like this there are, and how long they stay mad.

“WHEN BAGHDAD DANCED, FRANCE POUTED:” EuroPundits has a translation of an oped from Le Monde by Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann and Romain Goupil. You really should read it all. But here’s an excerpt:

Friendship gave way to overt hostility, despite the diplomatic smiles and the denials which functioned as confessions: “The Americans aren’t our enemies”…By its intransigence and its promise of a veto “regardless of the circumstances,” our country divided Europe, paralyzed NATO and the UN, destroying the possibility of avoiding a military confrontation through a precise, joint ultimatum that would have forced out the Iraqi dictator. Far from avoiding a war, the “camp of peace” precipitated one by playing Asterix against Uncle Sam. . . .

In the future, we will talk about the hysteria, the collective intoxication that shook France for months on end, the anguish of the Apocalypse that seized our better halves, the almost Soviet ambiance that welded together 90% of the population in a triumph of monolithic thought, allergic to the slightest dissent. In the future, we will have to study the media’s partisan coverage of the war—with few exceptions, this coverage was more activist than objective, minimizing the horrors of the Baathist tyranny in order to better reproach the Anglo-American expedition, guilty of all crimes, all problems, all misfortunes in the region. . . .

Let’s face it: Anti-Americanism is not an accident that happened over-night or a simple reticence in response to the Bush Administration. Anti-Americanism is a political creed that unites one person to another, in spite of their differences—the Front national and the Greens, socialists and conservatives, communists and separatists…On the left as well as on the right, it is rare to find someone who did not give in to this “nationalism of imbeciles” which is unfailingly symptomatic of resentment and decline.

Read the whole thing.

THE NASHVILLE TENNESSEAN has decided that it owns the right to use “A.M.” Puhleez.

(Via Bill Hobbs).

A PROMINENT PUTIN CRITIC has been murdered in Moscow. Some people are calling it an assassination, and blaming Putin. Are they right? I don’t know, but Putin’s gradual consolidation of power is looking more and more dubious.

BERNARD BAILYN WEIGHS IN ON WEBLOGS: Well, sort of.

(Via Dave Winer).

HERE ARE SOME THOUGHTS ON WAR CRIMES AND HUMAN SHIELDS that you may find interesting. And here are some more.

WHAT WOULD BUGS BUNNY DO? Reader Shawn Lavasseur emails:

It’s Ironic that with the early buzz about “Shock & Awe” and the MOAB bomb, that the real big military technological advancement shown in this war is not the bomb with a bigger bang, but a bomb with no bang at all, the “Concrete Bomb”, a GPS guided bomb meant to smash into things, but not explode.

Or as I prefer to call it the ACME Guided Anvil.

Yes. I hope it produces the standard Warner-Brothers whistling sound as it falls.

UPDATE: Reader George Walton emails:

Reminds me of an Albert Einstein remark: He didn’t know what weapons would be used to fight World War III, but he know what would be used for WW IV — rocks.

A really smart man!

And really smart rocks.

NIGERIAN ELECTIONS ARE ON THE WAY, and things look ugly:

LAGOS (Reuters) – Threats of violence mounted in Nigeria on Thursday ahead of a weekend presidential election after opposition leaders accused the ruling party of rigging last Saturday’s parliamentary polls.

The main opposition has warned of mass protests after the scale of last week’s victory by President Olusegun Obasanjo’s ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) sent tensions soaring in the world’s eighth biggest oil producer.

Of course, they often do. You can read a (somewhat) more positive account here.

UPDATE: Here’s another story.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON WRITES ON THE THREE WEEKS’ WAR:

But the lethality of the military is not just organizational or a dividend of high-technology. Moral and group cohesion explain more still. The general critique of the 1990s was that we had raised a generation with peroxide hair and tongue rings, general illiterates who lounged at malls, occasionally muttering “like” and “you know” in Sean Penn or Valley Girl cadences. But somehow the military has married the familiarity and dynamism of crass popular culture to 19th-century notions of heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and audacity.

The result is that the energy of our soldiers arises from the ranks rather than is imposed from above. What, after all, is the world to make of Marines shooting their way into Baathist houses with Ray-Bans, or shaggy special forces who look like they are strolling in Greenwich Village with M-16s, or tankers with music blaring and logos like “Bad Moon Rising?” The troops look sometimes like cynical American teenagers but they fight and die like Leathernecks on Okinawa. The Arab street may put on shows of goose-stepping suicide bombers, noisy pajama-clad killers, and shrill, masked assassins, but in real battle against gum-chewing American adolescents with sunglasses these street toughs prove to be little more than toy soldiers.

There’s this, too:

It was almost as if we were trying to exorcise a demon from an innocent zombie host, and thus had to use enough shock to chase out the spirit without damaging the body. That paradox in and of itself meant that a long preliminary bombing campaign was politically impossible — especially with the world’s news agencies ensconced in the Palestine Hotel paying bribe money to Baathists for the privilege of sending out slanted and censored news about collateral damage.

Read the whole thing.

REX MORGAN, MD — weighing in on tort reform? Yep.

JOE BIDEN’S GETTING LESS-THAN-RAVE REVIEWS AT HOME over his sponsorship of the wretched Rave Act. (The story originated in the L.A. Times, but this link take it to a reprint in the Delaware News Journal.) Biden does sound rather defensive. . . .